Sapphopolis

By Bob DCosta

"Escaping from the terrorist agent her father has sold her to and finally crossing the border, Ghungroo only has her lesbian-lover and her seven-month-old dead foetus-brother talking to her in her head as her sole companions. But taking refuge in the country across the border, will she win in the fight to get back her lost identity? And what wil

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ukiyoto Publishing
• Release date: Jan 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9789361720925

Book preview

Prologue 1

I am Ghungroo, a Refugee

Everywhere there’s autumn smelling in the air, and all over in the streets of Calcutta. The memories of the evening draped by the golden colours of a sunrise have tired me, and these are the memories I have in my mind as I declare my love for this confused city – the queen of the country if you are a lesbian, and if you are gay then the city is a male, and if you are none of the above – that is, you love the city because it’s a city where you were nurtured, then you love Calcutta because it’s nothing but Calcutta, the city whose contrasts vary from the few skylines determining to rip the skies to the pavement dwellings flattening the metropolis, because you know, loving your city is synonymous to art restoration. The city where even the mad man of the street quotes from Tagore’s Gitanjali to Shakespeare’s King Lear, the city whose colossal, old and ruined mansions boast of art in their flowing rhetoric.

A soul full of boiling ramshackle words snuggle inside, and a sorrowful gust of fatigued summer breeze tell my thoughts, and there’s the aimless 21-jewels water-resistant blue Citizen watch ready to tell my future, and the old blind woman of the pavement of Lower Circular Road. She treats me like her son whom she had lost in the Naxalite reign of terror in the early roaring seventies. This stone-faced cop, he questions an unlicensed whore outside The Lighthouse cinema hall and as I sit on the roadside boulder next to the narrow winding lane where a play of faint light from the mouth of the lane and some glow from the last hut inside cohabit, these faint unconscious patches of glow mixed with the darkness squatting forever within churns my thoughts. And as the dull brilliance lures me over the uneven squelching pathway, the sudden scream of a woman reaches my ears, and I aimlessly walk and peep through the small niche of a window of the shack strewn with wretchedness, only to find a woman throwing her legs up and kicking in mid-air, she is in constant fight against the male power dominating over her. When I resume my seat on the boulder, a boy of around eighteen has cupped his hand to the tap and he cools his throat with its sweet water. As he stands up, satisfaction spreads its soft comfort on his face, and soon after he turns towards the rickshaw, and stepping inside the wooden handle of a frame, lifts his vehicle and resumes pulling it, the small bell tied around his finger striking the wooden handle with a mechanical ting-tung-tak, ting-tung-tak. 

Blood runs down the streets, ting-tung-tak, ting-tung-tak, down the gutter, ting-tung-tak, ting-tung-tak, even bathing a ten-rupee note that slipped out from the hand of the lady of the street as she was throating out the final stanza of her baul song, ting-tung-tak, ting-tung-tak, her song of torn souls beyond the border. E=MC (power of 2), where E is the emotion, M is your Motherland and C is the Constant love for your country. This lady taught me this, the power of love over all kinds of power in this universe.

Ting-tung-tak, ting-tung-tak. 

Somehow the picture of a grandmother-old lady appears from the bag of memories, her head covered with white hair, a few streaks of blackness peeping from the straight receding white. She has lain her head on a footstool, it is a one-inch high footstool, and she folds a piece of cloth and places it on the footstool. And this acts as a cushion. She lowers herself on the mat spread on the floor of the open verandah and gently rests her head on the improvised pillow. This open verandah of her one-room hovel becomes her open bedroom, and it is vulnerable to rodents that scurry up and down the drain below her bedroom. She had spent many an evening rocking a little child in her lap, and at the child’s insistence repeated the song over and over again, but she always wore her smile, never did she show irritation, and the song Ten Children took the little child to the forest of the song and the river bank where each of the children played about, and at the end of every stanza, one child would either die or get eaten up by a beast or fish till finally the last child was left lonely, the half-a-song child, and he began to shed copious tears till his intense loneliness and immeasurable sorrow took him deep into the woods – from where he never returned for return was unwritten in his blood. Why did he go away, why did everyone leave him, why was he alone. These thoughts, all along, plagued this person as a child, and it still does.

Strange, that in summer, autumn lays hold in the city; and strange too that memories come of the evening but tinged with it, it’s the golden colours of a sunrise that has tired the city.

Ting-tung-tak, ting-tung-tak. 

(from the diary I am Ghungroo, a Refugee of the Bangladesh War of Independence)

Such was the condition when Ghungroo arrived in Calcutta and this condition continued even after she became a prostitute of the pavement but she didn’t know that I was somewhere around her for I sometimes rested in her mind and sometimes went away on my usual strolls.

Prologue 2

This is not a prologue, but a pact between you and me

Foetus-bro

I am foetus-bro. Ghungroo’s brother. And this is my sister’s story.

But I have no regrets for what I have done. 

However, it all started with what you people call an accident. Deliberate accident.

I call it a miracle.

*

Ghungroo

I am Ghungroo. Foetus-bro is my sibling.

But let me tell you one thing:

Before I begin to collect my notes, before I arrange the pages, number them page one, two, three, let me tell you, my friend, he is coming to take me away. He stays close to my residence and has never broken his promise.

So that you trust me, so that I will go without any regret, I have taken this task of arranging these sheets. And as I do, I will read out to you, to ensure that if you have some doubts, some questions playing hide and seek in your mind, you may feel free and ask me, I will clarify them. Thus, after having heard the journey of my life, you may give me a clean chit, clear me of blame and erase any doubt from tugging at your conscience. Because this happens to be the first time I have ever hidden anything from you. 

There, on the little cane table, your favourite pizza, Neapolitan Pizza, ordered online from Dominos counter, New Empire. They have topped it with tomato, garlic, oregano and extra-virgin olive oil. I insisted them to add two slices of bacon, your treasured salt-cured meat over it, so that as you listen, you will take bites in between and sip orange juice prepared in the fruit-juice mixer by me.

This is my story. My brother says I play the most major role. Sometimes I tell the story and at times he takes up the narration. 

Part One

The Making Of Ghungroo

It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

Foetus-bro

…and as she made an effort to hear herself think, the disquiet moans of the nightjars came through the closed window of her room, and in the wakeful trance of a quiet baby kicking the air, Ghungroo sat up and began counting backwards to the rhythm of the nightjars’ moans – 364 days, 363 days, 362... She looked out through the window and her eyes moved over the innumerable lily flowers in their garden that stood freshly wilted the moment they had bloomed in the sunshine.

I am seventeen years and three hundred sixty-four days old today, she whispered. The teak-wood smell of the bed; and the burnt-wood smell of the hookah fallen on its side; and the red terracotta smell of the dancing figurine, all were in the midst of an intellectual orgy when Ghungroo’s words punctured their poses. In the meanwhile, Ghungroo, in the same stupor, walked to the fungi-spotted looking glass on the side shelf, and continued. Tomorrow is my birthday. Today the day will wane at three in the afternoon, the wind whisper in my hair at dusk. But before that I need to finish my engraving. The eyes of the last pair of copulating monkeys are left unfinished. I must touch them up. But no sooner did she complete the sentence than the glint in her large kohl-black eyes softened and the smell of dying embers reclined on her semi-full lips. Did I ever come across this mixed feeling before? She shook her head.

Foreboding, she said to herself and gently ran her fingers over her dusky face. 

By then she was at the table, putting the books back on the shelf. The picture of the grey cloud on the grey cover of The Rebel kept pushing its way out while she was battling to imprison it. Shh. Remain inside, she reprimanded in her whispered tone, her face a serious dry river-bed of thoughts. The cloud smiled back, and a victorious wicked greyness gleamed out from his eyes.   

Continuing to muse and talking to herself, she click-clacked her tongue and smiled through her eyes, all the while looking at the hair-line cracks on the faded white walls. There were three hundred and sixty-four blue-coloured such cracks in their two-roomed house and she ran her fingers over them, one by one, over the hills and valleys of the scarred lines like one gliding her fingers over the black and white reeds of a piano with drunken artistry. When her eyes fell on the damp patch on the ceiling, she rested them there, smiled back, click-clacked her tongue and did five-second jigs with an interval of two seconds in between.

It was during those jigs and click-clacks did she see her father sitting on the stringed cot in the little front yard, his eyes on his daughter.

You have grown up, he said, lifting his head from his favourite China teacup chipped at the rim. You need to work for the family. His eyes were as expressionless as an untouched bowl of thick bland soup, its surface hardened and crusted into a frosty field. But whenever he applied this facial make-up, a hidden plan always peeped out from his unspeaking eyes.

Or so it seemed.

At father’s words, Mother, thin in frame, hobbled out from the kitchen, her left hand holding her large pregnant stomach, while her right hand held the khunti – the metal ladle. The fumes from her eyes stood between her and father readying for an everyday war. 

No. She won’t. She paused and breathed deeply, standing over the inscriptions of male and female monkeys in acts of copulations engraved on the concrete floor She’ll study. Yes. She wants to be an air pilot. 

But this time the noise of her gritting teeth gnawed inside father’s brain, the fangs of her decision penetrated deep and clamped at his hopes like a wolf’s fangs sinking deep into a hare’s throat.

Father sipped once more and threw her a cool level stare over the rim of his cup. In slow measures he stood up.

So you are the head of the family here, eh? I didn’t know any other boss really existed, except in stories.

He put his cup down on the brown frame of the cot and rested his hands on his hips, his eyes all the while locked into hers. Before the black rolling clouds in the sky could burp out angry continuous growls, he took three steps forward and touched her hair. Who’s the boss?

It’s me at home. Without the least hesitation mother’s proud and egotistic breathing said.

I’m sure not. And uttering that, father gave her a mighty push.

Ghungroo watched her mother fall; she watched mother’s reflexes thrust her hands out to her bloated belly. And she watched her pregnant stomach hit the floor with a sharp dull thud right where the inscription of the copulating monkeys lay unfinished.

And the nightjars crooned their moans from the neem tree.   

The light outside was a washed-out grey and it stuck to Ghungroo’s throat with the unspeaking admonishment of a sadist, for when her eyes widened, and she cried out Ma, the Ma squeezed itself into a pepper ball and lay wedged in her Adam’s apple.     

Mother on the floor, unmoving, spread-eagled, was more than a wasted human. Her head tilted to the left, offering her right cheek to her husband for the deed he had done. Her jawbones, smooth, stood out tight and hard, and her lower lip, pale, took a darker shade of pale. She produced guttural sound seeping out of her throat – she was Beethoven’s ghost playing Guttural Sonata on a sea-sodden piano.

When Ghungroo rested her eyes on her mother’s stomach, blood was a quiet flow of death oozing out from between her legs.

Sold

Foetus-bro

…and Ghungroo placed her ear on mother’s chest, her mind scrounging to define the indefinable silence that appeared at the door of mother’s little unreliable red machine you call heart. But all Ghungroo’s ears could capture was her seventh-month old little unborn brother’s squeals fading inside her mother’s little-big dark universe called womb. 

Father returned, cradling a pint of rum. And the first thing to happen was his eyes falling on his bitter-est half lying on the concrete floor, on the seeped-out blood around her abdomen, darkening the greyness of the ground.

Get up, he throated out a growl, his typical sneer hitting the ceiling. Make some snacks. Lying face down throughout the day, eh! and he pushed her with his toes. Enough of smelling the dust.

But mother’s weakling of a soul didn’t stir, it loved the seeped-out blood so much. Ghungroo got to know one thing then and there: Within mother, the fall had jarred him, the foetus-baby. Broken his sleep. Broken him away from life.

Broken me away, did I say?

But no. A sound of whisper. A soft rat-a-tat of a moving train you hear through your headphones for deep sleep.

And now this slow metallic vacuum-hollow music reverberated inside Ghungroo’s head.

Something stirred within. The slight-warm nerves in her brain turned a little warmer. Her seventh-month foetus-brother pushed her sibling’s hair with the slim pinkish-white frail thread of his hands and legs. And then, slow and sure, he had snuggled inside her head before taking a comfortable position, mewing to himself, tears misting his closed eyes.

Finding her sitting beside mother, father gave her a smooth look, all the while once caressing the bottle then running his hand over the seven-inch scar on his right forearm. Fixing his eyes on his daughter, he rose in slow degrees, caught her by the hair and dragged her down the yard and the stony road. And the same nightjars continued with their endless uneasy moans. Ghungroo made all effort to wrench her wrist out of his grip for nearly five minutes, but he was a strong bull, though he in his late fifties, and seemed to have been turned out to pasture for the landlord. Next when he threw his daughter’s five feet three-inch frame at the construction worker’s feet, his voice hurled the word out, Here is your dusky lady, Binoy. 

This man, tall and bony framed, fixed his beady eyes on her and moved his tongue over his lips, tasting an imaginary fresh lime-juice squeezed barbequed chicken.

He looked at father through his narrow eyes and flung a packet of currency notes towards him. Father’s eyes gleamed, and they lit up with wild joy at the rectangular pieces of paper looking up at him.

Just then an explosion sounded from afar.

Damn these terrorists, the man roared to the air around him.

The money had tamed father to a slave. They might be close, father said, caressing the notes. 

They won’t let me live in peace.

Patience. You need to stand by their side to attain peace. Father smiled, his voice a whisper, his mind picturing the rifle-strapped human terrors he met thrice a month. He cradled the notes, spreading the butter of sadism on the sandwich of his desires. Winking at the man, he turned round and started a slow-happy walk.

The man pulled and pushed his victim, but, digging her feet into the sun-fractured country road, Ghungroo threw him a side kick on the stomach. But the man’s expert eyes saw it coming, and he instantly grabbed her ankle and threw her down.

"You little randi. You whore." The cave man roared and shot a faster and resounding kick on her stomach. As she doubled up in pain, he dragged her all the way into his house at the crossing. It had red brick walls with palm leaves stacked as a roof. A tin trunk stood in the centre of the room with several bottles of bootleg whiskey. Sacks of potatoes and onions leaned against the other corner and their smell, mixed with the rancid tang of rice whiskey hung in the air. Ghungroo’s head swung and she grabbed the man’s arm but he threw her on the stringed caught. 

As soon as his bony fingers began caressing her hair, she removed his hand in that instant but in a flash he held it and lightly punched her on the face. When she resisted once again, he clawed at her dress and tore open the plastic buttons. Ghungroo scratched his face and hummed a moaning tune, finally giving a resounding slap on his face. At this his eyes enlarged into a vomit of anger but controlling it, he hurled two slaps on her cheeks. He laughed a coarse laugh, rejoicing in his growing passion. He watched her copper complexion turning a darker shade where his slaps landed. Then he began to follow a formula in his game: tearing at her dress followed by a slap. This went on till she lay without a single piece of thread covering her. By now her entire face was filled with dark piano-reeds of finger marks. She meanwhile had closed her eyes but continued murmuring and humming: Love for us, Michelle, was an ocean /where we journeyed on Crusoe’s raft… Our selves opened like boat sails of fishermen… She hummed-sang in a moaning tune till finally her voice faded and exhaustion took over. 

*

He repeatedly used her for days till, sick of her little body, he banged the door behind him one evening and plonking himself on the threshold, watched the fading daylight with a bored dull face. She was inside sitting on the floor, her left ankle fastened with a rope to the window frame.

She lay down.

She had been lying in that position since how long she was unaware, but her eyes and mind were floating on the feeling for the next word. A dull ache settled on the left side of her body, all the way from her neck to her toes where the pressure of the entire body had been resting, but her mind was active, excavating from the gold mine of her vocabulary. Love for us, Michelle, was an ocean /where we journeyed on Crusoe’s raft… What is the next appropriate word, what is the next phrase? Her mind still heady and dense, she turned and remaining in the same straight fashion with legs stretched, she lay on her back facing upwards. She folded her legs at the knees and began to chew on the next phrase. Our selves opened like boat sails of fishermen… How did Michelle float into my few poems I had been scribbling since childhood I have no clue. The name does sound sweet and has a gentle magnetic pull to the extent that it allows warm dregs to seep into my heart. A deep sigh escaped from her. Is there any girl with the same name whom I will meet some day?

Like a grey smog, the scene hung in Ghungroo’s mind and in the quiet steps of a cat’s, it metamorphosed into a rat and nibbled into the grey matter on the left side of her brain. Bored, after a while, the tiny rodent scurried to the central section, stopped and rested, and no sooner did it stand up on its hind legs squirrel-like, it immediately fell back, digging its sharp teeth into the pulpiness.

Darkness at the break of noon

Shadows even the silver spoon

The handmade blade, the child’s balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon.

How come these words have entered my mind, she murmured. I have not composed them. They don’t belong to me for sure but to someone called Dob Bylan. No, no. Bob Dylan.

The scene of her house appeared and she began separating the scene of her mother lying on the floor from these words, and while doing so, her ears picked up these words again and the daylight began to be swallowed and a shadowy thickness of clouds filled up the little room. A guitar and slender fingers moving over the stalk appeared. A female voice singing the song. Ghungroo made an endeavour, her muscles tightened to keep her focus on the voice and the words, but she somehow slipped out of her concentration. A face covered with straight silky hair appeared. It tried to remove the hair from the face, but at that very moment, sound of the main door being opened hit Ghungroo’s ears.

*

Why does the bitch have to moan and sing? Binoy said, pulling at the beedi. I use force and she sings the song of widows’ reunion under street lights. I place her hand over the heat of the candle flame and she doesn’t even resist but moans and sings baul song-poems of broken sunsets. 

While he was throwing out his disgust, a young farm hand, his friend, happened to pass by, carrying a bundle of grass on his shoulder. Seeing him, Binoy said, Hey, how are you, old pal. You look exhausted.

The man smiled and nodded.

Why don’t you rest your tired bones for a while? Binoy patted the threshold.

They both chatted and smoked sitting on the threshold. You seem to have made quite a profit today, Binoy said, You need to relax. Get a massage. And he pointed at the door. From the lady. She’s pretty. And young. Her skin, tight. Pleasurable. He paused studying his face. His friend’s mouth opened into a smile. You only have to pay a hundred and fifty.

At first the man hesitated, then they finally agreed on a hundred. Binoy, patting himself on his luck, began spreading the news of the beauty under his roof. Soon, after sunset, Ghungroo received the answer to her moaning when around twenty men came and went every evening. On the first day while the fifth customer’s work was in progress, Ghungroo picked out a needle from a crack on the cemented floor and pierced her thigh every now and then. The sharp pain was an endless shooting of a train’s siren, and concentrating on it, she travelled twenty times